Digital communication receivers must sample an analog waveform and then reliably detect the sampled data. Signals arriving at a receiver are typically corrupted by intersymbol interference (ISI), crosstalk, echo, and other noise. Thus, receivers must jointly equalize the channel, to compensate for such distortions, and decode the encoded signals at increasingly high clock rates. Decision-feedback equalization (DFE) is a widely-used technique for removing intersymbol interference and other noise. For a detailed discussion of decision feedback equalizers, see, for example, R. Gitlin et al., Digital Communication Principles, (Plenum Press 1992) and E. A. Lee and D. G. Messerschmitt, Digital Communications, (Kluwer Academic Press, 1988), each incorporated by reference herein. Generally, decision-feedback equalization utilizes a nonlinear equalizer to equalize the channel using a feedback loop based on previously decided symbols.
In one typical DFE implementation, a received analog signal is sampled and compared to one or more thresholds to generate the detected data. A DFE correction, v(t), is subtracted in a feedback fashion to produce a DFE corrected signal w(t). The same clock, generated from the received signal by a clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit, is generally used to sample the incoming signal and for the DFE operation. Typically, the entire DFE loop correction must be performed within one baud period T before the next correction is needed. At very high data rates, however, it is difficult to design circuits that operate this fast or to make them very accurate. Consequently, a number of techniques have been proposed or suggested for precomputing the DFE terms. Since there is no DFE feedback loop, the process of generating the DFE “corrected” decisions can be pipelined. In such a DFE precomputation implementation, the DFE correction is not fed back to correct the received signal and the input to the CDR circuit is thus non-DFE detected data. Thus, the CDR circuit processes unequalized data that still contains channel impairments.
A need therefore exists for methods and apparatus for generating one or more clock signals for a decision-feedback equalizer using DFE detected data.